


ending, beginning

by simplycarryon



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: self-indulgent rambling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 16:24:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5255186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplycarryon/pseuds/simplycarryon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>* They say he shattered across time and space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ending, beginning

**Author's Note:**

> self-indulgent rambling gasterfic I guess!

There is nothing to say about you, any more. There never was, there never will be; verb tenses are a thing of the past-present-future, a confusion of points like an unlabeled connect-the-dots drawing. You would make sense of it, if you had reason to speak at all, or to think of time in any linear capacity, but the view from the edges of the universe does not include timestamps. You experience everything and nothing at once, a euphonious cacophony of all existence.

Everyone speaks of you, and no one does. Everyone remembers you, and no one does. Fragments of your ashen existence lie scattered across the multiverse, tired-eyed lonely breaths of your former being, and you are forgotten, and you are remembered. The child knows you, in some capacity, in every variation of themself, in secret rooms and altered numbers; you talk to them, or you try, but in the end they do not carry your existence beyond the fragmented rooms that sum up your remaining presence.

It is. Difficult. You miss corporeality, inasmuch as you remember it, for the sake of your influence on others. You miss linearity, inasmuch as you ever had it. And you don’t miss those things, because how could you? The cosmos flowers at your attentions, draws up in shapes and curves endless across the horizon; how could you miss being a single entity, a nothingness, a question mark in the footnotes of the universe? 

But—when you think about it, which is always and never—you miss touch. You miss, in the mournful ghost of your own hands, the sensation of someone else’s. You miss presence and absence, and being at all, and you miss leaving quiet marks of affection on those you love-loved-will-love. Their names escape you; your name escapes you. What is a name but a breath, an exhalation of identity?

You forget their names, their relations to you on the diagram of existence, but you remember their faces. You remember, always, the fondness for them that sings in you in stardust and ashes; the sensation of emptiness being filled, of an adoration overflowing. You remember these things, and their fingerprints on every universe in your vast and minuscule understanding.

There are moments—instances in the fabric of reality where you can, for a brief eternity, assert what little you remember of yourself on the patterns of numbers that form the world. The people you loved, the beings that make you long for your own shape instead of a hollowed void in a backdrop of stars—they forget themselves, sometimes, too often. They are not like you; they are physical, tangible, fragile. They bend and they break and in the spaces between your hands you watch them struggle on without you, without anyone.

You cannot do much for them now, but you wonder if it is truly any different from what you could do for them before you were shattered. 

You tend to them, in moments, in gestures they barely notice; a blanket here, a whisper there. You stand sentinel over their souls, your lack of linearity rendering your attempts mere shadows of your intention.

A king. A scientist. A guardian. A dreamer. You know them in fragments, in pieces. They were yours, once, perhaps, in forgotten angles and undrawn lines, and then you were erased and now you are not.

You are, you are not. You will never be. You are an idea, a curiosity spread across universes, an endless ending and a beginning that never began. You may not remember how you are connected, how the you-that-was knew the them-that-is, back when omniscience was not your life’s blood, but you remember them. You are bound to each other somehow, in every universe, shades of family in every aspect. 

(You are lost. You are found. You are lost.)

You miss them.

But you lapse on, cessation unceasing, and what inconsequential sentimentality remains within you is little more than stardust and silence. 

You continue, because you must. That is your reward, your punishment; you go on, while they do not. They come to bitter and desperate ends, as all threads must. You watch them fade, like you watch everything; a fall here, a knife there. An undoing, an unbecoming; dust to dust. A future that never was, a past that never will be.

What hope is there, when you see everything, when you know how everything ends?

But, enough. There is a splinter of you that is insulted at the idea of spoiling an ending, even as you look out on the entirety of everything. You are the ashes of universes reborn, the breath of endings bent to new beginnings. What is despair in the vastness of eternity?

You begin. You end. You are, you were, you will be.

(You never were.)


End file.
